Businesses losing huge revenue due to lack of cloud expertise

A new study commissioned by Rackspace in collaboration with LSE academics has uncovered some staggering findings.

The study delved into research amongst 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros (including in-depth conversations with IT leaders) in large enterprises around the world to uncover current and future trends in cloud expertise.

More than 80 percent of IT decision makers within large enterprises in the Singapore region say they don't have the required cloud expertise and could be losing out on revenue.

This comes as no surprise as according to the report, enterprises across the world are losing out on a whopping US$258,188,279 a year as a result of a cloud skills gap.

This lack of expertise is also stifling creativity, with 68 percent of IT pros saying they could bring greater innovation to their organization with the right cloud insight.

Aside from innovation and growth, a majority 58 percent of IT decision makers believe a lack of skills is causing a lag in their organization's ability to deploy cloud platforms, while a 70 percent believe further investment in their workforce is needed to meet the developmental challenges of cloud computing.

"While the rise of Artificial Intelligence and automation may cause some to think that human insight is less important, our report shows that this is not the case," says chief technology officer of Rackspace.

"With technology and the cloud now underpinning business transformation, the growing technology skills gap means organizations must have a strategy to access the expertise needed. Those that don't, will struggle to be competitive and innovative.

36 percent of respondents reported already seeing a positive return on investment (ROI) on using the cloud, while a further 56 percent expect the cloud to deliver positive ROI in the future.

Despite the benefits, both IT pros and IT decision makers appear frustrated at not being able to use the cloud to its full potential:

• 40 percent of IT pros are spending more time than they expected managing daily cloud operations
• 62 percent of IT decision makers acknowledge that a lack of expertise is holding their business back
• 74 percent of IT pros said that deeper cloud expertise within their organization would help it increase the cloud's ROI

Just over half of IT decision makers are finding it hard to recruit the right talent to help manage their organization's clouds, with migration project management (44 percent) and native cloud app development (34 percent) the skills they're finding the hardest to recruit.

Assistant professor of information systems at LSE, Will Venters says cloud technology is quite simply a victim of its own success.

"As the technology has become ubiquitous among large organizations – and helped them to wrestle back control of sprawling physical IT estates – it has also opened up a huge number of development and innovation opportunities," says Venters.

"However, to fully realise these opportunities, organizations need to not only have the right expertise in place now, but also have a cloud skills development strategy to ensure they are constantly evolving their IT workforce and training procedures in parallel with the constantly evolving demands of cloud. Failure to do so will severely impede the future aspirations of businesses in an increasingly competitive digital market.

EMEA economist at global job site Indeed, Mariano Mamertino shares these sentiments.

"Finding, attracting and retaining tech talent is critical to business survival, and yet it is increasingly competitive for companies to find the technical talent they need as demand surges for such skillsets," says Mamertino.

"Our data shows that there is a global mismatch between the cloud roles advertised versus those being searched by IT professionals, which could accelerate the growth of a cloud skills gap. As this new report spotlights, there is both a financial and innovation gap to be plugged here for businesses globally.